Word: dulls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bewildering scene changes, has always been a terror to stage craftsmen, but it also offers charm, humor, pageantry and plenty of cues for imagination, and these the Met missed. Scenic backgrounds were ingeniously provided by special 5,000-watt projectors, but most of the projections were hazy and dull (one, during the Queen of the Night's big aria, looked like a distorted Manhattan skyline). And despite the magic lights at his disposal, Scene Designer Harry Horner insisted on trundling in all the conventional heavy scenery; one notably ugly set, looking like a Stone Age apartment house, made more...
Lacking a plot, Director-Adapter Julien Duvivier has strung together an ill-assorted, 115-minute necklace of incidents-some mildly irreverent (as when Fernandel steals a favorite crucifix from his old church), some funny, some dull. As usual, the priest is better at pugilism than piety: he knocks out a professional boxer to uphold the honor of his town, and when the mayor and a local capitalist are at each other's throats, he quiets them with a bludgeon. Balanced with these feats of muscular Christianity are a pastoral interlude where Fernandel softens the mayor's stubborn...
...Jorgensen broke his own record in the 220 and Gus Johnson placed third in the "Johnson 440" to highlight the swimming team's otherwise dull 66-18 trouncing of perennially weak Columbia at the I.A.B. Saturday night...
...Boston: Danny Kaye shows flashes of brilliance and mediocrity in The Court Jester at the Paramount and Fenway. Picnic is unpleasing because it is dull and Mid-western, though Susie Strasburg is infinitely Central Park West at Loew's State and Orepheum. Diabolique is still the biggest secret since John Thomson spent the weekend at the White House. At the Beacon Hill. Carousel has russet-thatched Gordon MacRae, which is more than anyone could ask, at Keith's Memorial. The Rose Tatoo is all AnnaMagnani's at the Met, which says ". . . Every week is a record. The crowds! The cheers...
Although a couple of good performances can conceivably outweigh the defects of a whole picture, they are not enough to keep Picnic from being dull. Not even the direction of Joshua Logan can do that. This is the first film which Logan has made in many years, so it is possible that his lack of familiarity with the medium led him on to approve such foolishness as the picnic scenes. At any rate, the eminent director's mere association with the picture is only another proof that the whole production is pretty well a general waste of talent...